Issue 02: Double Take and Déjà vu
Brit Barton
“Thank you for traveling all this way. You’re in the Zurich corner.”
“Ja, ja. Thank you for having me. How’s it going?”
“It’s good, I can’t complain…”
She strains a bit to hear him over the revelry, with that Romandy cadence she isn’t used to.
“...I wanted to ask you about your new project. Art & Order. Or just your criticism.”
“Mhm. And what would you like to know?”
“I just want to know how you write. I haven’t read it fully yet, but…”—he pauses as if he’s delivering some kind of long-term sociological study on critics and their certainty—“I know that you write between intimacy and ambition...”
She thinks of that one Schnitzler response: Is there anything else worth writing about?
“...And I notice that you use ‘I’ a lot. I would never.” He adds, like a gotcha statement.
She thinks of Ingeborg Bachmann: "Das Schreibende Ich"
“Intimacy and ambition. That’s probably…accurate.” She could counter with how innately sexist this kind of statement is, but she moves on and in for the kill, “How curious, though. You wouldn’t ever write from the first person perspective? What do you mean? How come?”
“It’s very American. It’s against my politics. I think about the We.”
“Right. And that would actually be against my politics. To implicate the royal We—the all-encompassing, the EVERYONE—to express a subjective opinion or experience on behalf of the collective…” She grimaces as her shoulders tense up like a cartoonish black cat arching its back. “Especially on something so visceral, abstract, or personal as art….”
“Of course. We do different things. That makes a lot of sense…” He trails off and tries to find immediate stable ground.
He goes on to say they are basically acting out some kind of theoretical position on the “I” from Lacan. Or is it Foucault? Either way, she has no idea what he’s talking about but nods in agreement as a courtesy and as a guest. Why everyone thinks she cares about French theorists—she’ll never know.
She reaches for the wine from the other table. She empties the bottle into her glass and dissociates briefly. She considers whether to break or suspend the moment. She opts for the former.
“Let me ask you though, because it really does beg the question—”
She takes a beat and turns to look at him directly, not out of confrontation, but squarely enough that her eyes narrow in as she tilts her head.
She knows exactly what she’s doing when she’s doing something like this.
“Are you a little jealous?”
***
A lot of life can happen in two months, like her newfound and completely erratic email etiquette. A message may go unanswered for days if it isn’t answered immediately—that is, if it gets a response at all. Voice notes have become a new indulgence—something she initially hated—until it hit her that life is already filled with so much useless text.
But, it turns out, the voice notes are just as meandering as anything typed out: How was the show? The movie? The talk? Your parents? Just okay; really good; absolutely horrible. I’ll tell you later. What else? Miss you, love you, let me know how it goes.
But with all of that said, the notes seem to conclude with something more pressing. As the deadline draws near, there’s this lingering question, especially when she cannot sleep.
What do you think an editorial owes an audience?
She reminds herself repeatedly: no one owes anyone anything immediately except decency.
***
She took the early afternoon train from Geneva and headed straight home. It was mostly empty until Fribourg, when the train car maxed out on hordes of uniformed men on their way to dienst.
Oh, fuck! She forgot to email back the image expert.
He once told her he did his zivildienst at the national film archive. Only in Switzerland would conscription happen in the trenches of an archive. He’s somehow seen every movie except The Piano Teacher. Ironic. She responds to his email then and there, countering his polite paragraphs with a brief sentence, as if it were a text.
“Should we go to the Rorschach archive together then?” Send.
Despite DND mode, two alerts come in—one after the other:
Emile Rubino has left 524 suggestions.
Cecilia Bien has left 12 comments.
The guilt sets in. She’s the only one not working on her own work. She should check in with Katharina Hölzl. She should cull the never-ending image credits for Razi. She should respond to all the unopened emails. But…she looks out the window and listens to music instead. There is still feasibly something, like, what? Four weeks until the soft deadline for the second issue…so it isn’t unimportant, just not necessarily urgent…she’s read that procrastination is the habit not of the lazy, but of the anxious…Can that possibly be true?
Interpretation, she knows, is an increasingly fraught matter. The same, she knows, for self-determination.
***
In an unassuming building not far from the Bern main station, the archive of Hermann Rorschach exists inside Das Institut für Medizingeschichte, where—after the death of his two children, both without children of their own—there is notably no copyright. Years ago, she visited throughout the summer when she first came to the country.
This time, a photo reproduction of a curious watercolor hides in a folder, inside another folder, stored in a box placed on a table and presented to her upon request. She went through all the images years ago, didn’t she? Why does this seem so distant and familiar simultaneously?
“Oh!” The image expert explains, “It's the Frosch-Katze study!”
“What’s that?”
“He was testing sensitivities for the inkblots. If you see a frog you’re sensitive to color. If you see a cat, you’re sensitive to form.”
She does a double take to see what she actually sees.
As if everything could simply be boiled down to color or form, emotion or content, intimacy or ambition.
“What might it mean to be sensitive to both?”
***
Lately, between edits and deadlines, she and Cecilia carry on as normal, discussing minor things. The goal is always to be brief and concise on a voice note, but it never quite works out that way for her; she averages around three minutes. She’s counted.
Cecilia is, by nature, much more matter-of-fact and to the point; a real Aries, a born-and-raised New Yorker. A trusted friend, but above all, a formidable opposite. Her voice notes average around one minute. She gives the most pointed and useful response on the looming concern at large.
“Audiences and editorials…it is an interesting question. It would definitely keep me up at night. Probably just some kind of explanation for the issue, what choices were made and why… but it’s your call. No one is saying you have to stick to a certain style but you should probably address the themes in some way…
What are you so worried about?
Do you think he’s reading it?
Do you think anyone really reads the editorial?”
She responded immediately with a four-second recording, a new record to off-set the average:
“I… sincerely, highly, genuinely, really fucking doubt it.”
The forthcoming issue for April is Spring Awakening: A Tourist’s Tragedy.
Thank you as always to the contributors and A&O Art Director Razi Hedström, as well as David Bucheli of Eikones at the University of Basel, and Stefan Hächler of the Institute for Medical History at the University of Bern.